Freud and Marxism.
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ALB – I think you were one of the editors who rejected my summary of the theory for publication in the Standard many years ago – I’m surprised that you forgot. Here’s the link: https://wezselecta.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-death-instinct.html#comment-form
Oh No — Not Philip Zimbardo also!
- BD: If anyone is interested in similar ideas, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and similar studies … give food for thought about authoritarianism. Don’t personally agree with Zimbardo’s take on his findings and the alternative interpretation by Erich Fromm is quite interesting, pointing out that the majority of the prison officer students did not join in the abusive processes, although they did not intervene.
When I mentioned “Stanley Milgram and his ilk” I intended to corral celebrity psychologist Philip Zimbardo alongside him. The antidote for both of them is Rutger Bregman’s Humandkind — read Bregman’s exposé of Philip Zimbardo’s fraudulence/hoax in Chapter 7.
By chance, this came up in my podcast stream:
It mentions Pannekoek’s “Marxism and Psychology” which examines the relationship between Marxism and Freudianism. https://aaap.be/Pages/Pannekoek-en-1938-Marxism-And-Psychology.html
Also, my supervisor for the last 4 years was a respected Adorno scholar. I still don’t know that much about Adorno but this review details the relation between Adorno and the Holocaust. Adorno refers to it as providing a new categorical imperative – we should arrange our actions so that the holocaust doesn’t happen again. No mention of the “death instinct”
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/adorno-s-practical-philosophy-living-less-wrongly/
For those interested, a new book about Wilhelm Reich, published by Brill.
Top of blurb:
‘ “From Communism to Work Democracy” is the first book devoted solely to Wilhelm Reich’s social and political thought and activities. It is an intellectual history tracing Reich’s evolution from a 1920s-style communism to work democracy, a form of anarchism, all shaped by his understanding of Marxism.’
Detailed table of contents at:
From Communism to Work Democracy. The Social and Political Life of Wilhelm Reich
As requested by Wez, a posting from the Lacan Thread.
Wez, I’ve read plenty of Freud and had the “pleasure” of working for three years alongside Freudian practitioners in therapeutic settings. I’ve had enough of their psychobabble to last a lifetime. As to their methodology, many thanks for providing an ample example and the opportunity to discuss the kind of illogical and pseudo mystical BS he and his follows like to ceaselessly regurgitate.With your (and others’ indulgence) let’s start to dissect some of the statements from you blog post. This is useful because there are many statements you make that are illustrative of the ways in which Freud and his followers come up with massive generalisations, illogically link phenomenon and come up with quasi religious conclusions based on very little other than their own musings.
For example you state “The child’s relationship with its parents is paradoxical from the start. It needs the mother to satisfy the stimuli for feeding and safety. We know that it also has sensual (infantile sexual) needs as well. When this is expressed in inappropriate behaviour a conflict with the parent is created (because of the moral and educational values of the adult). The child then experiences contradictory needs and is unable to deal successfully with stimuli.” This whole train of thought is predicated on a false assumption, infantile sexuality.
You state that “We know that it also has sensual (infantile sexual) needs as well“. But do we know that? How can you say with certainty that a child has infantile sexual needs? The whole basis of this part of your argument is based on Freud’s assumption that infant behaviour is stylised by the child having sexual desires towards one or both of its parents. What evidence is there for this assumption? Have you asked the infant? I think you’ll find that the infant won’t give a particularly coherent response. If, the behaviour being observed is not based on infantile sexual drives in its nature, then the whole idea that the child is in conflict with its parent falls. Is it not more likely that the sexualised behaviour of children and young people towards their parents that Freud observed were a result of sexual abuse in the children’s childhoods? I have worked alongside many children who have been subject to early years sexual abuse and highly sexualised behaviours in those children is a well known and consistently reported phenomenon. The whole “infantile sexuality” appears with modern eyes as being based on a misunderstanding of child behaviour and a confusion between cause and effect.
Next let’s talk about spiders. You try to link the idea of sex and the “death instinct” into the behaviour of some insects where the female eats the male after mating. In the weird and wonderful world of the Freudian this demonstrates that the urge to reproduce coming into conflict with the urge to survive. However a closer examination shows that this is nonsense. Does the male spider put themselves in a known position of danger because the drive to get his leg over (or maybe all eight of them) overcomes the danger he faces? That assumes that the spider has the cognitive ability to recognise that mating is a dangerous thing. Given that mating is a once and only pleasure, how on earth would the spider be able to recognise the danger and recognise that his mate is going to eat him and then become conflicted by the possible outcomes?
Moving on, what about your statement “some have believed that human sexuality lies at the root of irrational human behaviour. How else are we to explain why his theory of history is so successful in all areas except the most important one – the prediction of a socialist revolution?“. Well, yes, a small number of people do think that human sexuality lies at the root of irrational human behaviour, but they are very, very small in number. If you look at the work of Ellis, Beck, and many other psychologists, the development of irrational thought is viewed by many as being far more complex than the simplistic Freudian notions you appear to be alluding to. Are irrational thoughts (let’s face it irrational behaviour is a consequence of irrational thoughts) genuinely rooted in human sexuality? Let’s look at the irrational thoughts that are triggered by post traumatic stress disorder. Are these irrational thoughts caused by human sexuality? What evidence at all do you have to support the statement that you have made?
As another example, superstitions of all kinds tend to be irrational in nature, are all superstitions rooted in human sexuality? My brother Patrick had a phobia of giraffes when he was little, it was brought on by the fact that he misheard my mother when she used to say, “shut the back door and keep the draft out”, thinking she had said Giraffe instead of draft. No doubt Freud and his follows would have concocted some tale where our Paddy had been somehow frightened at some point by viewing a giraffe’s undercarriage and become concerned that a bloody big spider was going to eat him after having had sex with him!
However your approach (a familiarly Freudian approach), is to put all of this clearly unsupported dogma into a huge generalisation “How else are we to explain why his theory of history is so successful in all areas except the most important one – the prediction of a socialist revolution?“.
How else indeed, well I can think off the top of my head about half a dozen explanations which don’t involve human sexuality being at the root of irrational behaviour. How about Marx being over optimistic? How about Marx not being able to predict that rather than the workforce coming together in greater and greater numbers, that new technology would actually start to separate workers from each other and reduce the nature of collective action? How about the fact that premature mistaken revolutions such as the Bolshevik revolution would provide the perfect propaganda tool for capitalism? How about the fact that the capitalist has developed far more sophisticated propaganda mechanisms than Marx foresaw? How about the fact that political and social reforms have provided some degree of short term relief for workers at times of crisis?
No, no, no!!!! Cast these kinds of practical, historic, factual based thoughts aside, “how else could we explain” the failure of Marx’s predication of a socialist revolution but by the irrational thoughts of the workers regarding capitalism, but by those thoughts being rooted in human sexuality. What a load of baloney.
And then the final, Freudian, crowning achievement, “the death instinct” is linked to sex and satiation of appetite. You state that after a meal, or following sex we achieve a status of satisfaction, of contentment and emotional calm and somehow cognitively every last one of us link those experiences to being dead! We say to ourselves after a good feed or an enjoyable shag, “this must be like being dead”. However, this is not an occasional thought that some of us bizarrely have, as you say it’s an instinct (Thantos) it is there for all of us, hanging over us just waiting to emerge (just quite how evolution which is based on survival and reproduction has achieved this instinct is never explained, or what use it is in the quest for survival or reproduction). I must be quite strange, when I contemplate death (we all do at some stage), I have never once thought to myself “I suppose dying will be a bit like having a nice meal or a satisfying roll in the hay”.
You go on to state “No organism can survive without simulating death.” That’s not true, though is it? You can watch a mussel as long as you like, you wont see it simulating death, I had a cat for nearly 20 years, he never simulated death even once. Yet another huge unsupported and factually incorrect statement, just like the whole edifice of Freudianism it is built on foundations of sand.
So to finally prove the fairytale nature of your musings, you tell us that somehow there is a “longing of the animate entity to return to its inanimate origins?”, yet practically the whole of religious mythology is built upon the idea that religious faith will somehow provide some form of eternal life. How is it then that religions have thrived for millennia whilst being based upon a belief that you think is contradictory to the internal longings of the animate to return to the inanimate.
If you want to believe all of this undiluted bin juice, it’s up to you, bonny lad, but don’t think that for one moment it provides any kind of insight into the human mind or human behaviour.
Just to add a further perspective to my view of Freud:
It lacks empirical scientific grounding and it is a rigid, deterministic model of child development.
it relies on retrospective clinical speculation, rather than a data-driven, biopsychosocial approach. this can be broken down into three main areas of criticism:
1. Linear Developmental Stages & Fixation
Freud’s psychoanalytic model posited that children progress through immutable psychosexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, etc.). Freud argued that if a child experienced trauma or over-gratification during these specific windows, they would become “fixated” or later “regress” to that stage, dictating their adult personality.His rigid stage theory is really a non-starter for developmental science and completely in contrast to all on going research and data driven studies. For example the work of Michael Rutter proved that human development does not follow a single, fragile tracks-and-stages layout. Instead, he proposed a dynamic pathways model. He demonstrated that development is an ongoing, fluid process influenced continuously by an interaction of genetics, environment, and subsequent life events well into adolescence and adulthood.
2. Overemphasis on Internal Fantasy vs. Real-World Discord
Freud’s later theories heavily prioritized a child’s internal unconscious drives, innate aggressive instincts, and intrapsychic fantasies (such as the Oedipus complex) to explain psychological conflict and distress. Wez has himself championed this kind of approach with his posting on ThanatosHowever empirical findings show that environmental factors and tangible family dynamics were far more predictive of behavioural outcomes than abstract internal conflicts. If you read through Rutter’s classic text “Maternal Deprivation Revisited” where he looked closely at issues of maternal separation, Rutter demonstrated that a child’s long-term antisocial behavior or emotional distress was not caused by an abstract psychological fixation or a simple break in a singular maternal bond, but rather by real-world family discord, conflict, and environmental adversity. This fits in very readily with the idealism of Freud v the Materialist concept of history of Marx.
3. Lack of Empirical and Falsifiable Evidence
Freud built his highly complex theoretical structures almost entirely on retrospective case studies of adult patients (such as interpreting a child’s phobia through a speculative lens).Psychoanalytic theory is fundamentally inadequate because it did not hold itself to modern scientific standards, quantitative testing, or replicable data. Theorists in Child development have effectively replaced psychoanalytic dogma with epidemiological data, natural experiments, and genetic research. This even influenced John Bowlby (the pioneer of attachment theory) to distance himself from traditional psychoanalysis, leading him to ultimately concede by 1988 that psychoanalysis was “profoundly incorrect” in its specific theories regarding child development.
It has been argued hundreds of times that Marxism and Freudianism are not compatible. Some famous intellectuals from the School of Frankfurt tried to do that, and they failed. It is like beating a dead horse, and now some new gurus are trying to revive Freud, and it is not working either
Freud was a medical doctor, and he should have known that the death instinct is against human physiology and against homeostasis.
The human body is always operating in negative feedback and will try to balance itself, and the immune system protects humans against death; sometimes the immune system can kill a patient, as in the case of septic shock, when the immune system overreacts to an infection.
Probably he never worked in a trauma department.
The case of Jacques Lacan is even worse than Freud, reframed the death drive not as a biological urge to die, but as an “undead” force of symbolic excess—an endless, repetitive loop seen in addictions and human obsessions.
All this stress on “death drive” etc. Aren’t you all throwing the baby out with the bath water?
Must we condemn all psychoanalysis on the basis of obvious errors?
Granted that capitalism is the cause of most neuroses and mental illness, there is much that is not explained by it. Phobias, for instance.
It is the immature who reject the totality of someone like Freud’s thought on the basis of obvious errors. Your vehemence and venom at any notion of psychoanalysis, when there is much we do not know about the mind (I mean – good grief! – many of you even believe in unmotivated will!) is practically bolshevist.
The best socialist précis I have read on Freud remains Blewitt’s two-parter in the Standard. It is calm and fair.
Rejecting Freud is not necessarily rejecting psychoanalysis. The term psychoanalysis, in modern usage, is now often used to signify a range of approach that analyses the mind (psyche).
Again rejecting Freud does not mean rejecting psychotherapeutic approaches. There are many much more sophisticated and well researched approaches to psychotherapy and counselling that do not rely on Freud’s mumbo jumbo.
Similarly I do not reject talking therapy, I have undertaken a great deal of professional training, study and qualification in talking therapies and counselling.
Claiming that rejection of any attempt to reject Freud is in any way saying there is nothing to be gained in examining the function of the mind, is like saying you aren’t interested in medicine, disease or epidemiology, just because you reject the theory of miasma.
As to comparing criticism of Freud to Bolshevik practice is beyond satire. Freud and his followers required a slavish devotion to the dogma of the great mind, Sigmund. Many noted psychologists have made comparisons to Freud and his followers to cult like behaviour. Any criticism of the dogma resulted in rejection, expulsion and virulent criticism by him and his followers.
Jung, Berne, Bowlby are just a few that faced the wrath of the cult.
The theoretical work of people like Bowlby, Rutter, Sagi, Berne, Claude Steiner, Mary Ainsworth, Erik Erikson, Fritz Perls, etc. are far more worthy of attention than Freud’s quasi mystical musings.
To suggest that Freud made one or two obvious errors, is a bit like saying “well the captain of the Titanic may have made the odd navigational error”.
To be fair to Freud, he was pretty early on the scene. Although you could argue that Mezmer and Breuer were there first. He made use of the concept of the unconscious mind, but he was by no means the first. He was however a good publicist.
I would also say that his whole psychosexual stages theory, was not only wrong it has been has been very harmful.
To me, the whole concept of infantile sexual drives is very concerning. Without going into great detail, the number of perpetrators of sexual abuse I’ve come across who have claimed it was the child’s fault, or that children “enjoy” the abuse is pretty high. Over many decades Freud’s theories have led to many children’s disclosures being ignored or considered to be either part of the Oedipus or Electra complex.
It does possibly lead you to wonder why Freud developed these theories in this way. What kind of mind would early infant and child exploratory behaviour into a system of infantile sexual drives?
Could it be that rather than being the child’s fantasy but that of the Austrian Doctor who was making the observations?
Could it be that the whole Freudian system had its genesis in Freud’s attempt to deal with his own issues rather than those of the children he treated?
To use Freud’s own concept of Ego Defence Mechanism, could it be that he used projection to project into the children his own desires and then used sublimation to channel his ownunacceptable, primal impulses or aggressive drives into socially acceptable, productive, and creative actions. Now there’s a thought!
Children have romantic desires and romantic friendships long before puberty and (although I can’t speak for today’s children) long before they know anything of sexual mechanics or how babies come about. They are conscious, even so, that the feelings they have are different from what most mean by friendship, and exceptionally powerful. The cultural indicators which constitute the individual child’s upbringing will determine the child’s notions of the romantic. They may be popular cartoon characters or film and TV narratives and characters; at one time characters in books.
Today, I dare say, blatantly sexual indicators are probably absorbed much earlier than in my time.BD – Sorry about my tardiness in responding to your original post but I’ve been quite busy the last few days and haven’t had a chance to reply in any depth. Firstly let me say that your charge of ‘massive generalizations’ is rather rich coming from a fellow Marxian Socialist since generalizations is our stock in trade. We believe in the cause and effect of modes of production causes class struggle that leads to cultural and political historical change and we extrapolate this to all human cultural evolution. Likewise a physicist would insist that the ‘laws of nature’ are universal – and you can’t find a greater generalization than that! I have to ask did any of your former ‘Freudian colleagues’ manage to help anyone? Freud came to believe that sexuality was but one expression of ‘Eros’ (the life force) and so your objections to the existence of infantile sexuality are confusing sensuality and sexuality. You speak of other ‘majority’ psychologists opinions dismissing Freud – but don’t most of them equally dismiss Marx? Any psychologists opinion is profoundly weakened if he/she has no understanding of how capitalism is a psychological cancer. Many mammals fight for the right to mate so putting the two stimuli of survival and procreation in a contradictory dialectic. The inability to successfully respond to stimuli – desire, creativity in one’s work, catharsis of the arts etc. can and does cause severe mental distress that sometimes leads to suicide. Buddhist meditation is dedicated to destroying the turmoil caused by the frustration of living in such an alienated world – just one example of a religion/philosophy that does not fear death. I will read your sequel and respond to that.
Boys, without any interference from others, begin to masturbate by the time they are five years old.
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